


Safe From Harm

by Glinda



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Crossing Timelines, F/F, Hospitals, Time War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-24
Updated: 2011-10-24
Packaged: 2017-10-25 01:32:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are wounds from the Time War and Charley is stuck in one. Just because they can’t rescue her doesn’t mean they can’t help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safe From Harm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jinxed_wood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinxed_wood/gifts).



> Written for [](http://jinxed-wood.livejournal.com/profile)[**jinxed_wood**](http://jinxed-wood.livejournal.com/) in the [](http://dw-femslash.livejournal.com/profile)[**dw_femslash**](http://dw-femslash.livejournal.com/) ficathon. Timey-wimeyness as requested, though it lead to me writing something that isn't as light and fluffy as I'd have liked to give you. Many thanks to [](http://significantowl.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**significantowl**](http://significantowl.dreamwidth.org/) for the short notice beta

It’s supposed to be a hospital; a place of healing. It reminds Martha of visiting a former plague hospital, something of death in great numbers and futile battles against the odds lingering in the air. It hasn’t been in use for decades, maybe even centuries, but even devoid of any other living beings the purpose of the place is obvious. No amount of alien accoutrements and weird temporal events can change that.

The Doctor had wandered off earlier, taking readings and muttering about temporal anomalies and wandering spirits. Wandering spirits aren’t renowned for wearing rubber-soled shoes so Martha presumes the approaching footsteps herald his return.

“What kind of hospital was this place?” she asks.

“It was originally a research station,” responds a voice that is definitely not the Doctor’s. Martha spins round in response and is confronted with a young woman wearing what looks for all the world like medical scrubs. She smiles ruefully back at Martha and continues, “Researching temporally-active viruses, especially the Dalek-created variety. Then war broke out and the Viyrans abandoned the place along with all their research specimens. It was left to us to take their research and implement it when the infected started turning up on our doorstep. A few temporally active species sent us some medical staff but it’s all a bit makeshift.”

“It feels like a plague hospital,” Martha responds carefully, watching her companion.

The other woman nods her agreement and walks over to the large windows that look out on a desolate planet and a stunningly bleak starscape. For all her futuristic scrubs, she has an old-fashioned hairstyle and an accent that makes Martha think of Agatha Christie adaptations. Martha crosses the room to join her at the window, looking out over the planet and wondering if they are seeing the same view. The other woman’s breath fogs the glass briefly as she rests her forehead against the cool glass of the window for a moment.

“What’s your name?” Martha asks eventually, as the silence stretches between them.

No response comes. When Martha looks across at the other woman again, there’s no one there.

~

The Doctor is fascinated by the story when she tells him, but remains strangely subdued in his investigations. His usual bounce and glee in the face of a time anomaly is strangely absent. He rattles off explanations ten to the dozen but there’s no joy to it, just a deep sadness he won’t acknowledge.

The following day, as they walk through the halls medical staff, a patient on a stretcher being wheeled amongst them, suddenly surrounds them. One of the staff is holding what looks suspiciously like an IV bag above the patient. Another grabs a pen from Martha’s top pocket, calling ‘Thanks, Martha,’ through her surgical mask as she goes, before they literally disappear round a corner. Martha had pressed herself against the wall but the Doctor had stayed where he was, and the whole crew of them had passed through him like so many ghosts. He looks as pale as though they really were ghosts.

It’s a closed loop, he tells her. The staff can’t be saved but they can be helped. The two of them have knowledge that can help if nothing else they can make a few deaths less painful. Perhaps she’s distracted by the opportunity to learn first hand about the war that has so badly scarred him, to help ease that burden a little by helping others that distracts her, but she never questions why the anomalies can see and touch her when they pass through the Doctor like apparitions.

Nonetheless, she takes to wearing her white coat in the halls and the next time she finds herself caught in the anomaly she is alone. They ask if she’s the help the Doctor promised to send them and she agrees that she is; it’s close enough to the truth. One of the nurses pulls down her mask, revealing herself as the woman she met before, introduces herself as Charley Pollard, a human time-traveller like herself and barely ten years her senior.

By her third encounter with the anomaly Martha knows the names of all the staff, they have grown accustomed to her appearing and disappearing at random intervals and she and Charley have become firm friends.

~

Martha is carrying a strange array of cables from the TARDIS to one of the outer labs for some obscure experiment the Doctor is being vague about when the air in front of her ripples and Charley steps out of it unexpectedly. The other girl’s expression transforms from irritation at the unexpected time travel to delight on laying eyes upon Martha. Charley rushes up to her and sweeps her into a hug before kissing her soundly on the mouth.

“You were right! It worked. We were too late to save all of them but six of the Thelonians lived. I don’t know how you knew but you’re an absolute genius…” Charley trails off in the face of Martha’s obvious bafflement.

There are probably more important questions to be asked but the only one that Martha is able to verbalise in that particular moment is: “you kissed me?” It’s not that she’s objecting, more that she’s surprised. Martha can count on one hand the number of women she’s kissed and most of them were before she travelled with the Doctor. (Hollywood had definitely lied to her about the future being full of beautiful people who found kissing her irresistible.)

“Wrong point in your time line then,” said Charley looking faintly awkward.

“Kiss me again and I won’t tell anyone about potential paradoxes,” promised Martha.

It was a very good kiss and if Martha never mentioned the incident to the Doctor, she was sure to check up on Thelonian biology in the TARDIS library next time she had a free moment.

~

She’d almost forgotten this. The excitement and the adrenaline of saving lives like this. Those rare days when everybody lives. Martha remembers only occassional ones from her rotation in Accident and Emergency. Multi-car pile up on the M1, dozens of serious injuries, head injuries that should be fatal, people bleeding out under your hands and yet somehow, somehow they saved them all. She remembers the adrenaline and the sheer unadulterated joy of it, of her arms slung round her fellow students afterwards. Near dropping with exhaustion but determined to go out celebrating nonetheless. The close press of bodies, kissing and touching, fumbling in toilet cubicles together, getting as close to another person as physically possible. They’d felt like gods that night. She’s touched that feeling a few times since, she’s saved whole planets, but it’s not quite the same. That one to one feeling of saving a life that should have been lost is like nothing else she’s ever known. Saving lives is why she became a Doctor every bit as much as her need to take care of people.

Charley’s new to this feeling and it’s so good to get to share it with her. To feel her whisper stories about adventures in airships and space ships against Martha’s skin, tales of swordfights with dastardly villains both human and alien spilling from her mouth between moans of pleasure. Martha in turn murmurs about her hospital ending up on the Moon and seeing the Moon landing on television while stuck in 1969.

This is not Martha’s war and she knows that it will not end well for Charley, but if she could Martha knows she would stay here, fight against the tide of death and disease until that end. She can’t so she gives Charley all the help, all the love she possibly can, while they still have time.

~

Martha walks around the corner laughing at something one of the nurses just said and finds herself alone in the present. She can hear the faint echo of their shared laughter (a familiar voice calling out that “Martha’s gone again” in fond exasperation) around herself a moment and then it’s gone. The hospital isn’t silent though, Martha thinks she hears familiar voices so she doesn’t linger, heads smartly towards the sound.

Sometimes she steps only briefly back into the present, traversing between pockets of the past like service corridors. On some occasions she will have been gone only minutes, other times weeks, but still everyone is too busy and grateful for an extra pair of hands to bother with her time keeping. She’s not sure how much time is passing in the nominal present. The Doctor changes the subject when she asks, insisting she sleep when she looks tired, offering suggestions for possible cures to distract her when she’s desperately trying to get back to the bubble she just accidentally walked out from.

Her steps slow as she gets closer. Charley seems to be the only member of the staff that can walk out of the time bubbles, Martha presumes it’s because of her connection to the Doctor and the TARDIS. Both Charley and the Doctor have let slip enough that she knows they travelled together for some time in a previous incarnation of his and that some terrible paradox related incident occurred of which neither of them will speak. The two of them are locked in conversation and Martha doesn’t want to interrupt them.

“This isn’t…this time anomaly that’s happening here. It isn’t because of me is it?” Charley asks.

“No. No, this is just left over damage from the Time War. Your being here only makes it easier for me to find the anomaly after all this time,” the Doctor assures her.

“There is an afterwards then?”

“For some of us. The universe survives and so do I, beyond that…I can’t tell you more,” replies the Doctor, regret colouring his voice.

“You know how this ends, don’t you. You know who wins and who loses.” Not a question, or even an accusation, just a statement.

“Everybody lost,” he says with a finality that suggests he’s said it before. Martha remembers the Doctor’s rage and bile in the New York sewers when faced with Daleks and wonders again how much else the Daleks have taken from him.

“As with all wars then,” says Charley wistfully. “I am sorry Doctor.”

“So am I, Charley, so am I.”

~

The last time, Martha doesn’t know it’s the last time. The bubble closes behind her as she stumbles out of it mid-conversation, the riposte she’d been about to fire back at Charley dying on her tongue. As ever there is no time for goodbyes. The Doctor is waiting for her and she knows from the relief in his eyes that the anomaly is over. She wants to scream and cry, to demand that she go back one last time. Demand that they save Charley. She does none of those things, instead sitting down abruptly where she stood. The Doctor sits down beside her and they sit in silence together for what seems like a very long time.

They don’t speak of the impossibility of rescue. She doesn’t ask and he doesn’t offer, nonetheless the unspoken conversation hangs in the air. He doesn’t tell her that he was scared he’d lost her too and she doesn’t ask him if he had loved Charley the way she did. Instead he asks:

“If you could have stayed, would you?”

Martha stares at him for a long moment before responding: “Wouldn’t you?”

Neither of them reply, but they know each other’s answer anyway.  



End file.
